Friday, April 26, 2013

Friday

Buon compleanno, Roberto Ridarelli. Happy birthday, Philly’s own Bobby Rydell. I’ve seen him on stage. Grazie per tutto. Bonus: the original ‘Volare’ by Domenico Modugno.

Lodato sempre sia il bel Nome di Gesù e di Maria. I don’t know where exactly I fit on a churchmanship map other than being trad but with a difference. Pre-/non-conciliar liturgically, Latin with Counter-Reformation finery... but with organ and Anglican hymns. Looks like the church before the council; sounds partly like an Episcopal service then, only without the sound of congregational recitation, that deep muffled drone. Devotionally I’m very moderate. Christ- and Eucharist-centered, Mass and office (and it doesn’t have to be in Latin), with hardly anything that would give an old high Anglican or conservative high Lutheran hives, if you don’t mind a statue of Mary in my bedroom and the daily rosary. (Besides the stuff about the Pope, they wouldn’t like my occasionally making it to Benediction.)

Just finished a year-long project indirectly for the church, making pages for and proofreading an 80-page pro-life (and pro-heterosexuality) book a private foundation will be giving out a couple of million copies of at World Youth Day in Rio this summer. (The Holy See unofficially supervised the project.) Guess they hired me since I look like the World Youth Day type.

Which is better: clannish low-trust culture or liberal universal individualism?Steve Sailer’s brought this up again, unsurprisingly, since the Boston Marathon bombing suspects are from a Mediterranean-/Middle Eastern-like culture. (Roissy: alpha is alpha in any culture. Women love dominant men.) He and his friends write about that culture with a mix of fear and envy (they don’t like the foreigners but wish whites were more race-conscious like the foreigners are). I believe in individual rights, not white power, black power, gay power, etc. (remember, this freedom protects conservative Christians from a hostile mob, in theory), but no man is an island. It’s related to the debate of opinion in the church on religious liberty, which I believe in. The true church, like an ethnic family writ large, vis-à-vis individual rights. Brother trads to my right think the latter’s Protestant. Like Sailer I like the 19th-century British liberals but I remember that this fine Anglosphere culture, confident because it was aware of its strengths, has degenerated starting with Protestantism into today’s secular humanism/political correctness (including using hostile minorities as pawns in a class war with conservative whites). Reason to like Italian-Americans: as one of Sailer’s commenters wrote, they never really bought into Sixties crap (slumming WASP kids with notions from 19th-century Germany). Witness the bar brawl in A Bronx Tale; go, mob. (P.S. César Chavez, a born American, was against illegal immigration.)

Modestinus on looking East. He says one of my points: a great thing about the church is they don’t teach you to hate the Orthodox and other Easterners. (Quite the opposite: educated trads see the natural affinity.) So why not be Greek Catholic? Believe me, if life in the Roman Rite goes bad again under modern low-church Pope Francis (I’m not EWTN: under John Paul the Overrated, it stunk), that’s an option (if he rolls back Benedict’s reforms, taking my Mass away in the official church). But the Orthodox’ anti-Westernism, both the occasional rant from the old country and the convert-boomlet cult’s continued evangelical anti-popery, along with the super-strictness in theory (starving yourself four times a year), sours me on the rite as a first choice. 19th-century Russian culture’s great (so’s Russia now with a badass like Putin in charge) but I don’t like being told my own heritage is evil. Greek Catholics have a different problem: half-Novus latinization. I’m sort of a purist (which is exactly what Rome tells the Greek Catholics to be, liturgically: just like the Orthodox) but don’t mind latinizations at all when they’re old/Tridentine.

Daniel Nichols sums up George W. Bush. This man left a trail of carnage and chaos. If there were any justice he and his cronies — or should I say “handlers” — would be in jail. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rowe, Wolfowitz, Pearle, and the rest of them set out to establish a Pax Americana and left two broken countries and a nation in economic collapse. The pundits who foresaw Iraqis greeting American troops with flowers, who told us the war would be a “cakewalk” still rake in the big bucks for their opinions. I wonder if it ever occurs to him that he is responsible for the deaths of God knows how many grandchildren of Afghans and Iraqis. In 2000, before 9/11 Changed Everything (the powers that be’s Reichstag fire?), when he sang a different, non-interventionist tune, so he seemed a serviceable alternative to the culture wars’ Great Satan who was then bombing Serbia for no good reason (hindsight: by dumb luck, being boxed in by a hostile Congress, he was functionally, unwillingly, the best conservative president in recent history, presiding over a boom; he was entertaining, too), I voted for him. I wonder how much of that old conservatism was sincere (over 20 years ago, Dick Cheney talked sense about these matters) or if it was a pose all along, from a family of Rockefeller Republicans (neocons are Wilsonian liberals who migrated to the GOP). The Project for a New American Century had the real plan up their sleeve. You can fool me only once. I never voted for a mainstream Republican again. (Like Murray Rothbard voting for Stevenson, in ’06 I was functionally a Democrat!) I’m a libertarian who votes for people like Ron Paul in Pennsylvania’s GOP primaries, the only reason besides abortion I’m a Republican on paper.

2 comments:

My Catholic family became politically homeless when the Dems turned evil on the abortion issue. How could any honest, aware Catholic stay with a party whose president said the following at a Planned Parenthood conference today:

"As long as we’ve got to fight to make sure women have access to quality affordable healthcare, and as long as we’ve got to fight to protect a women’s right to make her own choices about her own health, I want you to know that you’ve also got a president who’s going to be with you fighting with you every step of the way.”

"The fact is, after decades of progress, there's still those who want to turn back the clock to policies more suited to the 1950s than the 21st Century And they've been involved in an orchestrated and historic effort to roll back basic rights when it comes to women's health."

The party is chillingly Orwellian on baby-murder. Now they're doing the same with "marriage equality". Progressives have always been scary---think back to the eugenics obsession earlier in the 20th century. The irony in all this is that PP's founder Margaret Sanger, racist eugenicist that she was, would have told Obama's mother to "plan" Barack out of existence.

Of course the Republicans cannot be trusted. The only real anti-abortion president we've had since Roe v. Wade was George W. Bush. People forget that as recently as 1976, the Republican presidential candidate was more pro-abortion than the Democrat! And the GOP is now playing catchup with "marriage equality", with virtually all of Bush's 2004 gay-marriage-baiting campaign team now all for the Supreme Court forcing it on all 50 states! (Even Bush himself said "no comment" this week when Diane Sawyer asked him if he "evolved" on the issue like his wife and daughters. Guess that constitutional amendment talk was only hot air...).

I didn't vote for president in the last 2 elections, and I doubt I'll bother about Jeb/Christie vs. Hillary in 2016 either.